Why news organization that operate anonymous and unmoderated discussion forums are being reckless and actually impede transparency. And how the news industry has fallen under the spell of a techno-utopian fallacy that says it can foster a renaissance in journalism, civic involvement, and comity simply by implementing new-media technologies.
My eulogy to Minolta cameras. They’ll stop being made this year.
Congratulations to Gary Kebbel (left) for being named Journalism Initiatives Program Officer for the the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, where he’s assigned to identify the people, processes and projects that will advance quality journalism in this century. Kebbel most…
The accomplished Mary Berner resigns from Fairchild Publications
Congratulations to my client Critical Mention Inc. for closing a $4 Million round of Series B financing last month! CIBC Capital Partners, Silicon Alley Venture Partners, Stonehenge Capital, plus other prior investors in Critical Mention, placed the money with the leading online…
“The people formerly known as the audience.” New York University Journalism Professor Jay Rosen, quoted in The New York Times about how new media has empowered people to correct traditional media.
I’m back at my desk for 2006. This will be a pivotal year for the news industry. The tipping point has been reached. Most news broadcasts and printed newspapers and news magazines finally realize that they are, if not yet dying, then dinosaurs in the tar pit. Meanwhile, the many upstarts who hope to replace those dinosaurs will this year be realizing that their solutions (such as just ‘citizen journalism’) are neither as functional or appropriate as they think. Stay tuned for an exciting year. Plus , I’m pleased to be entering my 27th year in the news industry.
Why and where I’ve been offline during the past week.
A known flaw in Windows 2000, plus a smashed backup PC, leaves me largely offline. I’m meanwhile trying to run the business from a wireless PDA.
Tawdry publications can now afford flying cameras of their own.
Pulitzer Prizes become open to online content.
Traveling too much during October and November, I am remiss in not yet congratulating, or even noting, the election on October 18th of David Carlson (pictured), the Cox/Palm Beach Post professor of new media journalism at the University of Florida, to president…
Digital Journalist online magazine has at least three good items this month: • Photographs and stories from the new book Unembedded. There has been much reporting on the war in Iraq by Western photographers who work ’embedded’ behind U.S. troops. However, photographers…
Why ‘Verified’ Circulation Is Now Separate From ‘Paid’ Circulation.
Faith in technology requires patience
Traditional publishers and broadcasters aren’t the only faction whose perspective creates an illusion. Today at Corante’s Symposium on Social Architecture, I’ve heard speakers state as fact that ‘newspaper publishers think they own their readers.‘. I’ve been working in the newspaper industry since…
Take the following with a grain of salt. According to Nielsen/Netratings, it’s the lists [pdf] of the 10 content categories with the strongest female and male broadband audiences in the United Kingdom during August: Among Males (694,164 surveyed) 1. Automotive Parts &…
Leo Bogart, a Polish-born, former U.S. Army Intelligence officer in World War II, who later applied his talents for analysis to the media in general, and tried to reverse the decline of American media, died Saturday in Manhattan. During the 1960s, Dr.…
Congratulations to Adrian Holovaty, Matt Thompson, and Inform Technologies. Boos to U.S. newspaper corporations for claiming that newsprint price increases are forcing them to cut staff (an excuse that Slate’s Jack Shafer roundly debunks) and boos to FIFA for banning immediate online publication or broadcast of digital images of the next World Cup.
Ebb Tide, Greenwich, Connecticut (click to enlarge) – © Vin Crosbie What makes September and October major months for travel? Projects conceived during summer vacations are launched then. My travels for clients always spikes during those months. Nevertheless, I’m now home for…
As a little boy during the World’s Fair of 1963-4 in New York City, I first saw a prototype of what the telephone was supposed to be by the year 2000. It was supposed to be a videophone. For example, the photo…
Congratulations to online journalist and software engineer Adrian Holovaty, whose chicagocrime.org today won the $10,000 Grand Prize in the Batten Award for Innovations in Journalism. Created as a public service by Chicago resident Holovaty, with design input from Wilson Miner, chicagocrime.org lets…
I’d appreciate anyone’s recommendations concerning Internet hosting (co-location) facilities, including roof rights (i.e., satellite dish), in London or Dublin. E-mail me via vin at digitaldeliverance.com — Vin Crosbie
Long-time online entrepreneur Alan Meckler‘s Jupitermedia is selling its Search Engine Strategies trade shows and its ClickZ.com Network of Web sites, including its SearchEngineWatch.com, for $43 million in cash to Incisive Media plc, a public company in London. UPDATE: Alan Meckler explains…
LexisNexis and our client Critical Mention have formed an alliance to deliver TV video search and print news clips in a cost-effective package to small and medium-sized businesses.
The Pew Internet & American Life Project reports that the vast majority of Americans still have no idea what those terms RSS and podcasting mean.
Five finalists are selected for the 2005 Batten Awards for Innovations in Journalism.
Can an organization be a clothing company without making its own threads? Much brouhaha has been written lately about whether or not Google is a media company. It’s the type of ontological question that tends to fascinate theologians during the medieval era…
Are you one of the publishers who thought that millions of people would use :CueCat scanners while reading printed newspapers? If so, A-Z Computer Liquidators of Anaheim, California, has a deal for you. Millions of :CueCat scanners for just US $0.30 apiece…
Here is a question for all you reporters and editors: How would Woodward and Bernstein (and The Washington Post) have reported the Watergate story if they had had today’s online technologies? What would they have done better? Worse? How might investigatin and…
It’s sometimes easy for new business ideas to blur the line between satire and reality. An example is the following idea we conceived while mulling over new markets for podcasting. Many users of iPods and other portable audio file players seem to…
As a native New Englander, I was relieved to hear U.S. National Public Radio’s Robert Siegel reveal the tragedy in Vermont.
My company’s business is the busiest it’s been since the height of the dot.com boom in 1999, which is another way to say that we’re swamped. Or maybe swamped isn’t an apt verb because there’s no muck involved. The work onsite for…
Starting with his posts on the WELL in the early 1990s and through his work as staff legal counsel to the Electronic Freedom Foundation, I
“There are two kinds of people in the world: Those who believe there are two kinds of people in the world and those who don’t.” –Robert Benchley, American Humorist (1888-1946) There are two types of people who work in the new media…
Lucien Carr, Gordon Joseloff, and Gary Paul Gates at UPI reunion, Oct. 2003. Beat luminari, killer, and wire service journalist Lucien Carr, one of the most interesting characters with whom I’ve had the pleasure to work, passed away Friday. Who was Lou…
After a long holiday period, I’m back in my office and now working on a broadcast industry project that I’m not yet at liberty to disclose. (I hope to tell more about it later month).
Without being laid off or fired, you can’t legitimately claim to be a guru in the online news industry. It’s like getting bloodied in battle. For example, I think 2000 was the year when Steve Yelvington, Howard Finberg, and Leah Gentry were…
Hitachi plans to begin selling a color-capable electronic paper in 2006. Rather than use organic light-emitting (OLED) diodes, the way that Philips’ e-paper does, Hitachi’s device will use a liquid crystal displays (LCD) 3-centimeters thick and equipped with a special panel that…
Netimperative features an interview with Nico MacDonald, author of the excellent book What is Web Design. An excerpt: “The most common, if understandable, mistake is to assume that the Web is the best medium to use. In reality the PC-based Web browser…
Oracle Gets PeopleSoft, At Last — Information Week, 13 December 2004 I’m not sure that double entendre is what Larry Ellison in mind.
The Online Publishers Association often induces statistics to prove that content is king online. This association’s first attempt was two years ago, when it released statistics that purported to show U..S. consumers spent $675 million for online content in 2001, a 92…
Although The Daily Telegraph is missing two online pioneers (see below), two other pioneers of online publishing have new jobs: Yahoo! has hired Wall Street Journal Online founder Neil Budde as executive producer of Yahoo! News. And, promoting within, the Financial Times…
The Daily Telegraph of London is celebrating its tenth year of online publication, but without two of the pioneers who put it there. Hugo Drayton started in 1994 as marketing director the Electronic Telegraph and, largely on that success online, rose to…
More than a year ago, we wrote about Mario Garcia, a world renown expert on newspaper design, predicting that the majority of the world’s newspapers would became tabloid-sized within his lifetime. Garcia a few years earlier had predicted that a large number…
There is more and more evidence that U.S. newspaper circulation has begun a possibly fatal free fall. Beginning around 1964, daily newspapers’ print circulations in the U.S. began steadily to decline at a compound rate of approximately half a percent per year.…
I’m back from a week checking out the online publishing scene in London. My thanks to my hosts
I’ll be in London this Sunday through Thursday on business. I’d like to meet some of the Londoners in new-media about who I’m read or heard. If you’re one of them and care to have a pint with me then, please feel…
The Guardian today reports that Daily Telegraph Managing Director Hugo Drayton has left that newspaper. There had been speculation that Drayton, who published the United Kingdom’s largest-circulation (one million) broadsheet newspaper, would last now that Hollinger International has sold the Telegraph Group…
By November 18th, I’ll have been consulting full-time to the online news industry for eight years. That work has taken me around the world several times and given me clients on four continents. I’m proud of it. I’m likewise proud that my…